entrance

To the going-out
entrance

U 12.1559:– Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance
out.

When tension builds up to
bursting point as a result of a nasty rumour spread about Bloom by Lenehan, the
nameless I-narrator of the Cyclops episode asks Joe Hynes and the other cronies
in Barney Kiernan’s to “show him the entrance out”. But after imbibing three pints, he is only going
to “pumpship”, rather than leave them for good.

The paradoxical phrase entrance
out was not crisply coined in 1904, as it can be traced back at least to 1863:

An Irish labourer, admiring the
manner in which a certain wharf carried out the arrangements as regards the
entry and exit of vehicles taking goods there, was asked by one of the clerks,
"What do you think of the wharf now?" – "Never a finer this side of the
Thames," says Paddy, "if it had but another entrance out."

Bristol
Mercury (1863), 7 March p. 6

"Shure,
which is the entrance out" asked an Irishman at the Coventry Station the other
day.

Leinster
Express (1867), 2 March, p. 2

All the examples - including this joke from Punch,1illustrated by Phil May - have the
cliché of the naive Irishman as the originator of the phrase that Joyce picked
up in the summer of 1919 in Zurich and added to his notesheets.